This topic has been a fixation of mine for a very long time. Here is how I opened an article a couple of years ago in National Review:

I still remember the first time I walked into a working factory. In the foreground, innumerable machines whirred and clacked away in precise, interlocking dances. A massive vat shaped like a 50-foot-tall Campbell’s soup can loomed in the background. It was encased in a protective sheath of refractory bricks that glowed dusky pink with trapped heat. A crane arm dumped heavy sand continuously into the top at (literally) industrial volumes. Steaming, liquid glass gushed out of the business end at the bottom in a matching stream. I couldn’t see the heating element, but it was in there somewhere, and it was working. …

I was looking at concretized human ingenuity. In the auto industry, “car guy” is a slang term for an executive who doesn’t just view the business of a car company as making money, but loves the cars themselves. I’m a factory guy.

I spent the first few years of my career in the 1980s as one small part of a self-conscious movement to rescue American manufacturing from its projected obsolescence. I’ve worked in glass plants, assembly plants, oil refineries, and textile plants from Florida to Canada, and many points in between. I’ve carried a union card and walked a picket line.

I’ll put forward several propositions as being as being relevant to this discussion. (This would be a very long blog post, so I’ll break them up into several posts.)

Proposition 1: Competitiveness is productivity

Professional economists often pooh-pooh the importance of national competitiveness. To quote Krugman:

The growing obsession in most advanced nations with international competitiveness should be seen, not as a well-founded concern, but as a view held in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.

They will point out that we all gain from trade, and as people in other places get richer, so can we. Countries, they say, are not like corporations.

Maybe so, but it’s still the case that some societies are populated by lots of people with high-wage jobs, nice houses and good schools, and other societies are populated by lots of people hustling for tips from vacationers from the first kind of society. Over time, people who spend their working hours generating goods or services that they can sell for a big margin versus the costs of the required inputs will tend to live in the first kind of society. Nothing is forever in this world, but I want America to remain in that camp for a very long time.

This doesn’t occur by immiserating other societies — international economic competition is not zero-sum in that sense. But there are many paths open to us for how we react to the rise of non-Western economies, some of which lead to us being much better off than others, both in an absolute sense, and also in a relative sense.

Relative productivity is likely to matter a lot, because it will materially influence future absolute wealth by affecting the flow of global technology and innovation. But relative productivity and wealth also matter in and of themselves. First, they will impact the global prestige and success of the Western idea of the open society which we value independently of its economic benefits. Second, maintenance of a very large GDP per capita gap between the West and the rest of the world will be essential to maintaining relative Western aggregate GDP, and therefore, long-run military power.

In sum, we want the rest of the world to get richer, but we want to stay much richer than they get.

This demands that we sustain rapid productivity growth over many decades. Unfortunately for us, this is much harder to do for an advanced economy than for those in catch-up mode, and is likely to continue to create very tough social strains in America. Perhaps we’re just not up to it. This, and not some lets-all-succeed-equally-together happy talk, is the real meaning of globalization for America in 2011.